Data moves through organizations in a constant state, going from one individual, department, or office to the next. As new and different data sources like social media and wearables become part of the data pool that businesses collect and analyze for decision-making, data warehousing processes are becoming increasingly complex.

We had the opportunity to talk with many PowerCenter users at Informatica World in Las Vegas in May and they shared a lot of information about their IT Automation requirements, at the application and enterprise level, and how it could be improved. Application vendors, as we have previously addressed in our earlier posting, focus their resources (money and time) in developing the core capabilities of their products rather than enhancing their solutions with a robust automation system necessary to address today’s business and operational requirements.

PowerCenter, as presented by Informatica, offers industry leadership in “…converting raw data into information to drive analysis…” which is consistent with the premise that too often the vendors of these critical applications require their users to identify alternative approaches to address the automation tools included by the vendor.

In recent years, the democratization of analytic, reporting and BI solutions has become a driving force in the growing complexity of data integration and data warehousing models. Add to the equation the growing complexity and volume of information thanks to Big Data, and it’s no surprise that the underlying ETL and data warehousing processes to integrate and access data from multiple sources is becoming increasingly complex.

Never before have IT organizations been under more pressure to change, both from internal and external forces alike. Changing IT environments, new regulatory compliances, the Internet-based, 24/7 consumer or trying to gain a competitive advantage within the marketplace…these unpredictable forces thrust change on the demand and capacity of enterprise IT infrastructure. It’s resulting in an increasing rate of change to the systems and processes that the modern IT organization is responsible for. IT automation is no exception to this.

In today's fluid 24/7 world where business demands are real-time and IT is being asked to “script” business processes into automated workflows, old-school batch processing can no longer cut it. Posting a job to run every night at 3 AM was fine 10 years ago, but today these processes have to be run in real-time and workload automation is the key to industrializing business processes to save companies time and money. Here are three of the most common business processes that Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. sees customers automating with ActiveBatch to save money and ensure SLAs are being met.

Attending Informatica World presents the opportunity to speak with IT professionals about one of the strongest use cases for job scheduling and workload automation: the end-to-end automation of ETL, data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) processes.

Fluidity is the new mantra in workload automation. Management demands, data sources, SLA requirements, computing infrastructure—everything attached to IT is turning more flexible, more diverse and more nimble in order to satisfy the accelerating pace of business. At the center of it all, job scheduling and workload automation is becoming more important than at any time in the last 30 years. In the past twelve months we’ve witnessed the continued evolution of business IT into something faster, bigger, and more adaptable than we could have imagined even a few short years ago. Workload automation technology is responding with new solutions that will be increasingly visible in 2013 and beyond. These are the key trends we’ve identified that are re-shaping the segment:

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